It’s a little extraordinary when you realize that you’re the one getting in your own way.
New piece up on The Rumpus about improv, the movie Don’t Think Twice, and lots of feelings.

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@andrealaurion
It’s a little extraordinary when you realize that you’re the one getting in your own way.
New piece up on The Rumpus about improv, the movie Don’t Think Twice, and lots of feelings.
Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.
Brian Eno, Here Is What Is (cf. David Rakoff: “Writing starts off as shit.”)
Haunted houses and pumpkin-carving are better in a group than with a plus-one.
Had a listicle up on the Washington Post last week!
You’ve Got Mail was one of the first movies to depict the Internet as it affects the lives of ordinary users.
A recent piece up on The Rumpus about one of my favorite movies, 90s internet, and how we connect with one another.
Her weight was never a topic of discussion on “Gilmore Girls.”
New essay up on The Hairpin (pssst... on my bday too!)
I once heard someone say that wearing a school uniform as a kid leads to adults who are either fashion obsessed or fashion oblivious. I was definitely the latter.
(via Can You Put a Price on Individuality? Examining the School Uniform — The Billfold) New piece on The Billfold with *bonus* personal photos!
Nothing makes Pittsburgh come out of its shell like gorgeous weather. Such a temperamental force in Western Pennsylvania, it makes people hibernate in the winter and cozy up next to an air conditio...
I’m going to be blogging for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra every now and then.... and here’s the first post!
There are times when I know I’ll like something before I ever experience it. Some things just appeal to my sensibilities—fast-talking teen shows, Wes Anderson movies, anything that combines sweet and salty flavors. It feels like cheating, making a decision before actually taking a bite, but if I see Bill Murray in the trailer, I know he’ll make me happy. When it came to Ben Folds, it was the opposite. I thought I would give him one listen and be done. Instead, he sunk into my consciousness in a way I was never expecting.
Albums Of Our Lives: Ben Folds’s Rockin’ The Suburbs by Andrea Laurion.
Annie Waits” summed me up in ways that I wasn’t consciously aware of at the time and not only because Annie was my childhood nickname. Waiting was a constant state of my life. I didn’t just feel unrequited love. I majored in it, I specialized in it, I could have taught classes in mismanaging it. I was always, always, always waiting.
Albums Of Our Lives: Ben Folds’s Rockin’ The Suburbs - The Rumpus.net
I have a new piece up on The Rumpus!
(via andreadisaster)
SOMETHING NICE by ANDREA LAURION
Our room was pretty much as we left it. Titanic movie poster on the door and NSYNC pin-ups next to Got Milk? ads. Dusty trophies mixed with Precious Moments figurines, untouched for years. Our American Girl dolls, hers: Samantha, and mine: Molly—leaned on each other for support from our bookshelf. Even the wooden name placards our grandfather made for us at our birth still hung side by side above our twin beds with matching daisy comforters: Jennifer, for my sister, and Katherine, for me.
Our parents had been talking about putting the house on the market for so long that when they announced the sale, we thought it was another part of the joke. The museum to our childhood was officially closing. Now was the last chance to clean it out and get a few souvenirs.
Jennifer was already in there, kneeling on the floor, half under the bed, her butt in the air. I was tempted to pinch it and make a joke that I was a literal pain in the ass, but she turned and noticed me.
“Good, you’re here,” she said. “Katie, we have a lot to go through.”
Standing in the doorway, it hit me how long it’s been since we were in our old bedroom at the same time. Our teenage years barely overlapped, my thirteenth birthday two months after her nineteenth. I missed her at college, but I didn’t miss sharing a room.
“How about you start in the closet, get all your stuff out, and then we’ll switch. There’s not really enough room for both us of to dig under our beds.”
“Fine.” It was then that I noticed the pop punk playing from the boom box on her dresser. “Nice tunes. Reliving the old days.”
She smiled and shrugged. “I found an old mix CD from high school and figured we needed background noise.”
We worked mostly in silence, occasionally speaking up to point out buried pop culture treasures (an ancient issue of YM magazine with Prince William on the cover) or an interesting piece of our own history (a shoebox of Valentines from long-forgotten classmates).
“Can I have this?” I held up a plaid babydoll dress, mostly blue and yellow, with occasional pops of green from where the two colors overlapped.
She glanced up. “You know that’s almost 20 years old.”
“The 90s are back. Everything old is new again.”
“Katie, I wore that in seventh grade.”
“You were chubby in seventh grade.”
She didn’t say anything. I closed the closet door so the mirror was facing me and slipped off my shirt before trying on the dress. It was tight across my chest, but doable.
“Did you ever really think about your name?” I said, looking at myself from the side and smoothing out the wrinkled cotton.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what does it mean that so many girls in the 70s and 80s were named Jennifer? It was basically an epidemic. What does it say about American society that everyone lacked imagination for two decades?”
“I don’t know, parents just liked it. Why do parents give the names they do? Because they like them.”
“Or to honor someone. You’re the only one in the family not named after someone else.”
“So?”
“So? Bobby’s named after Grandpa Bob, and I’m after Aunt Katherine.”
“There’s no rule that you have to name a baby after anyone.”
“Also, you’re like, the only Jennifer to not go by Jen, you know. Was that your way of trying to standing out?”
She didn’t reply and I looked behind me. Jennifer was on her bed with a stack of photos. I got up and flopped down next to her, laying on my stomach. I took her discarded pile and started flipping through them.
“Remember SeaWorld?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Yeah, you were really little.”
“I can’t believe someone thought it was a good idea to put a SeaWorld in Ohio.”
She stopped at the next photo. We were sitting in birth order on a concrete dolphin with a curved back for a perfect photo opportunity. Jennifer, about nine, grinning, her blonde hair in a long braid. Bobby, six, in the middle, a baseball cap casting a shadow over his little face. And three-year-old me, sucking my thumb and looking at something off camera.
“Did you ever see Blackfish?” I said. “It’s awful. Those poor whales. I feel bad we ever went there.”
She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “You were a little kid. We were all little kids.”
“Mom and Dad should have known better. Jennifer, we supported a corrupt organization.”
“Can’t you let us have anything nice?” She snatched the photo out of my hand and added it to the rest of the pile, which she then put back into the red photo processor envelope.
“Money was tighter back then. A lot tighter. They were trying to do something nice and take their kids on a little vacation.”
“O-kay,” I said. “I didn’t know. You can’t get mad at me about that.”
“Yeah, I can get mad. If you could stop being so selfish and goddamn self-righteous, you might be able to see life from someone else’s perspective.”
I rolled my eyes as she got up from the bed and stuffed a handful of papers in a garbage bag.
“God, Katie, it’s just…you just really are the worst sometimes. ‘You were chubby.’ ‘They should have known better.’ Give people a break.”
“I’m sorry, okay? I’ll just keep my mouth shut from now on.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she snapped back.
We barely spoke the rest of the day. I stewed in my head, thinking of biting comments I could have made. I almost let one slip. When I turned to say it, I saw over her shoulder that she was putting the envelope of photos into her purse. I turned around and shut up.
::
About the Author: Andrea Laurion is a writer, improviser, and performer from Pittsburgh. Her nonfiction and humor writing have appeared in The Toast, McSweeney’s, The Billfold, Neutrons Protons, and The Yearbook Office, among others. This is her first published piece of fiction.
Story Song: “Certain Tragedy” by Saves the Day
Photo Credit: Leesa Cross-Smith
This was my fiction debut! Very exciting.
What starts as a free pile of books ends up being a $15.50 pile of books and counting.
New piece on The Billfold!
Hi! Starting August 5, I’ll be sending out a monthly newsletter of original writing, cool links, personal recommendations, and other fun stuff. Sign up here!
I had never seen a character like Harriet before. Ramona Quimby had her moments of brattiness, but she was overall a nice girl. The characters in the American Girls series were only defiant when standing up for their beliefs. And the Babysitters’ Club books, the dominant literary force in my life at the time, were definitely nothing like Harriet.
New piece up at The Yearbook Office!
We get to pick who we become, whom we spend time with, and whom we support. Those aren't always easy choices, and sometimes they hardly feel like choices at all, but that's part of the work of growing up.
How Girls Grew Up in Season 4 -- Vulture
The creepiest part about getting robbed was how everything in my room was exactly as I had left it. I was at work when I found out what had happened, and it was hours before I could get home, so I had plenty of time to imagine the worst. In my head, the place was torn inside out, completely ransacked. Instead, just one thing was missing: my year-old MacBook Air.
The Cost of Getting My Stolen Computer Back | The Billfold New year, new essay on The Billfold!
In the three years since my friend Abby gave me her couch, she moved four times, changed jobs twice, became engaged, got married, and gave birth. During that same time frame, I didn’t move, married no one, popped out zero babies, and adopted one cat. My accomplishments happened on a smaller scale. I took four improv classes, ran my first 5k, drank countless cups of coffee, got up the nerve to try stand up comedy, watched every episode of Friday Night Lights, and read 78 books, most of them while sprawled out on that couch.
Where I’m Reading: The Brown Corduroy Couch by Andrea Laurion (via therumpus)
I flung off my glasses and tore off that white button down shirt. I had never, ever worn a tank top in public before — far too self-conscious to let anyone see that I was a teenager with arm fat — and here I was, dancing in front of my friends, enemies, and acquaintances, my belly fat one thin layer of cotton away from public view.
- Hit Me Baby, One More Time by Andrea Laurion (aka andreadisaster)